Originally built in 1915 as a two-car garage, this fanciful and diminutive residence was created atop the former garage in 1981 to become one of Boston’s best examples of Post-Modern architecture. Located at the corner of Beaver Place and Beaver Street on the Flat of Beacon Hill, the one-story brick garage was constructed behind 91 Beacon Street for Helen and Robert Emmons to store their personal automobiles. By 1981, the garage parcel was separated from the Beacon Street address and owners, Ira and Margaret Deutsch filed to build a one-story addition to the garage to create a residence. The couple worked with architect, Graham Gund, who designed a vertical, second-story addition to the brick garage, creating one of the most whimsical and unique buildings in Boston. The stuccoed walls with gables are covered with a projecting trellis which is set behind the framing of the windows to create a three-dimensional facade element.
Now functioning as the Park Street School, the handsome brick building at 63-69 Brimmer Street stands on the site of a former three-story brick livery stable and is an excellent example of the early 20th century revival of the Flat of Beacon Hill from the “horsey end of town”, to an upper-class enclave. The school building, which was completed in 1914, was designed by R. Clipston Sturgis, one of the premier architects of Boston, as one of the first “fireproof” schools in Boston. The school building originally had an open-air rooftop playground, and was designed with special attention to light and air ventilation, with a library, gymnasium, and recitation rooms inside. In 1939, the Brimmer School merged with the May School, which had been founded about 1900, creating the Brimmer & May School. The new institution then hired architect, Walter H. Kilham of the firm, Kilham & Hopkins, to enclose the rooftop playground, allowing for more usable space for the school. After the Brimmer & May School moved to Chestnut Hill in 1954, the building was bought by C.F. Burdett, as a new location for a private business school that had been operating since 1879. Burdett College remained in possession of the building until 1970 when Emerson College took over the building for its performing arts department. In 2003, Emerson College sold the building to Park Street Kids, a children’s organization begun by mothers at Park Street Church, located on the east end of the Boston Common and it has since been known as the Park Street School. The school was recently restored by Mills Whitaker Architects.
This granite-faced townhouse at 76 Beacon Street in Beacon Hill was built in 1906, and was designed as an early 20th century continuation of the Asher Benjamin-designed row of granite-faced townhomes to its east, built in 1829. The handsome residence was built in 1906, when Amy Gore Iasigi, the widow of merchant and statesman, Oscar Iasigi (1846-1884), purchased the site a year prior and hired architect, A. W. Longfellow, to design a new townhouse for the site. Ms. Iasigi resided here with her daughter, Nora Iasigi Bullitt, who with her mother, helped establish of a manual training school for girls in Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Nora was also a prize-winning sculptor, having studied under Daniel Chester French. As a woman of exceptional means, Amy G. Iasigi had seven domestic servants maintain her city mansion and carriage house on Byron Street. After her death in 1927, the proeprty was owned and occupied by wool merchant Robert Hooper Stevenson. The relatively modest Iasigi Townhouse’s granite facade is of a slightly different color than the 1820s granite townhouses nextdoor, importantly distinguishing it from its neighbors, and it also features flared granite lintels with pronounced keystones.
One of six attached houses townhouses between 70-75 Beacon Street, this stately granite-faced residence was built concurrently with its neighbors in 1828 on speculation for the Mount Vernon Proprietors, a group of wealthy Boston businessmen who helped develop Beacon Hill into the posh, architecturally significant neighborhood it is today. The Mount Vernon Proprietors knew how important Beacon Street was as the entry into the neighborhood, and thus, hired Boston’s premier architect, Asher Benjamin, to design the row. When completed, all of the houses were identical, but throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, they all deviated from the original design, some gaining additional floors, others adding bay windows, but all together form a cohesive and architecturally significant span of houses. Completed in 1829, the residence at 75 Beacon Street is known as the Mason-Fitz House and was originally owned by Jonathan Mason (1756-1831), a U.S. Congressman and U.S. Senator, and later inherited by his son, William Powell Mason (1791-1867), who engaged in real estate. It was likely William Mason who added the mansard roof in the late 1850s or 1860s, but the main unique detailing of the residence occurred in 1889 when newlyweds, Henrietta G. and Walter Scott Fitz hired the popular architectural firm of Little & Browneto reconfigure the front of the house in the Colonial Revival style. Little & Browne added the rather fanciful, oriel windows on the facade, which include the three, small hipped-roof oriels on the second story and larger projecting oriel on the first floor with fanlight and leaded glass. Cambridge architect, Edward T. P. Graham later purchased the residence and petitioned to convert the single-family house into eight apartments, but was denied, later converting the residence into four units. Today, the Mason-Fitz House is broken up into two larger condominium units.
One of six attached houses townhouses between 70-75 Beacon Street, this stately granite-faced residence was built concurrently with its neighbors in 1828 on speculation for the Mount Vernon Proprietors, a group of wealthy Boston businessmen who helped develop Beacon Hill into the posh, architecturally significant neighborhood it is today. The Mount Vernon Proprietors knew how important Beacon Street was as the entry into the neighborhood, and thus, hired Boston’s premier architect, Asher Benjamin, to design the row. When completed, all of the houses were identical, but throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, they all deviated from the original design, some gaining additional floors, others adding bay windows, but all together form a cohesive and architecturally significant span of houses. Completed in 1829, the corner dwelling is known as the Greenough-Dwight House and it retains its original three-story rusticated granite façade with segmental arch openings. The major change to the exterior of the Greenough-Dwight House is the addition of the ornate wood oriel window with iron cresting in 1874, the oriel and facade feature the iconic purple windows, which became a status symbol in the 20th century. The story goes, that between 1818 and 1824, an English company sent shipments of glass that contained too much manganese oxide into Boston Harbor. After being exposed to sunlight for an extended period of time, the manganese oxide in the glass began to turn purple creating the colored panes we love today. Over time, many panes broke or were replaced, creating the checkerboard appearance on so many windows, but many owners in the 20th century had imitation purple glass installed as a marker of wealth and prestige, like in this house and bay, which were built after the period that the glass was brought over from England. My favorite in the row, the Greenough-Dwight House shines with its granite facade and brick end wall, with panes reflecting the sun off her violet glass windowpanes.
Located behind the David Sears Mansion (now Greek Consulate) on Beacon Street, this handsome utilitarian structure fronts Brimmer Street in Beacon Hill and predates the building it adjoins. The two stables and attached caretaker’s residence was built around 1856 for David Sears, who lived farther down Beacon Street, but also owned other buildings on the street which fronted the Public Garden. He built this stable in the Flat of Beacon Hill, an area west of Charles Street in what Samuel Eliot Morrison coined, “the horsey end of town” for its prevalence of stables and carriage houses. The architect is not known, but the handsome structure features bays of shallow, recessed brick arches and brick dentil courses, showing the importance of good design even for uses such as a stable. The building later became space for furniture storage and an ancillary apartment to the adjacent mansion, until 1957, when the it was acquired by the Vincent Club, a women’s organization with the mission of raising money for the Vincent Memorial Hospital whose mission was to treat the “diseases of women.” Even though the Vincent Hospital merged with Mass. General Hospital in 1988, the Vincent Club remains in this former stable as its home-base and continues to carry out its mission to advance the field of women’s healthcare.
An interesting ensemble of seven rowhouses running along Brimmer Street in Beacon Hill, the Brimmer Street Terrace development showcases the rebirth the “Flat” of Beacon Hill encountered in the early 20th century from livery stables and carpentry shops to high-end housing and artist’s studios. Built on the site of a large livery stable, Brimmer Street Terrace was developed in 1912 by Gerald G. E. Street and William C. Codman, developers who sought to enhance this section of Beacon Hill and protect it from unsympathetic development, and hired architect Richard Arnold Fisher to design the houses. The rowhouses were originally rented to upper-class families but later were sold off as individual properties. Colonial Revival in style, the row is built of the iconic Boston red brick, Federal Revival style fanlight transoms over the entrances, include shutters, and all sit atop a stone basement. The row is anchored on each end by residences facing north and south with large symmetrical facades with the five more narrow rowhouses connecting them along Brimmer Street.
The three-story, masonry Union Boat Club facing Storrow Drive and the Charles River, was constructed in 1910 to replace a wood-frame boathouse the club had built in 1870. The western edge of Beacon Hill changed drastically when in 1910, the Charles River Dam regulated the water along the Charles River, removing its tidal nature. In the years before this, the Charles River Embankment was laid out as parkland along the riverfront, which in turn, made it so the original Union Boat Club site was no longer on the water’s edge. The original boathouse was moved to the Esplanade and this new clubhouse, with its high-fired brick exterior and cast stone trim, was designed in the Classical Revival style by the firm of Parker, Thomas & Rice on the original boat house site. The organization expanded its offerings, adding handball and squash to its members in the new, 1910 building. In 1928, a boxy rooftop addition was constructed adding two more squash courts which was later raised in height and covered in metal in 1996.
The Studio Building on Charles Street in Boston’s historic Beacon Hill, is a unique, Arts and Crafts style building constructed of brick with stucco walls and a red tile roof. Built in 1914 by William Coombs Codman, a real estate developer and member of the Beacon Hill Associates, a group of preservationists who bought and resold properties in the neighborhood with the aim to limit unsympathetic development. The group helped the Beacon Hill Flat area, which was a higher concentration of former stables west of Charles Street, a gentrified artist and residential enclave. Codman hired the young architectural firm of Loring & Leland, to design the Studio Building, which in its original configuration, contained three stores at the ground-level, two dwellings, offices and artist studios with oversized windows. Just years after the building was completed, Charles Street was widened in 1920, chopping ten feet off the facades of all buildings on the west side of Charles Street, including this building. Charles G. Loring was retained by Codman to oversee the renovations to the new facade and storefront, likely replicating what was once there. After 1920, the building was largely occupied by apartments for single women of means and remains one of the neighborhood’s most iconic and enchanting buildings.
These two near-identical townhouses at 1 & 2 Otis Place in Beacon Hill are significant architecturally and as they are bounded by four streets. The unique lots were created when Otis Place was laid out on made land in 1869 and were built the following year as an identical pair sharing a party wall and with their front facades facing south on Otis Place. The two residences were designed by the firm of Ware and Van Brunt, who blendedSecond Empire and Victorian Gothic styles with gothic arched windows, bracketed cornices, slate mansard roof, and later Colonial Revival porticos added in 1916 by architect, Frank A. Bourne. No. 1 Otis Place (right side with the oriel bay window) was first owned by Henry G. Pickering, a dealer in engines and machinery at the height of New England’s industrial revolution. No. 2 Otis Place (left with later fanlight entry), was originally owned by Robert E. Apthorp, an attorney and realtor, who decades earlier, was an active member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, the group established to harbor and assist fugitives from slavery after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850.
This unique three-story building on Otis Place in Beacon Hill, Boston, was actually constructed in 1872 by owner/architect, Abel C. Martin (1831-1879) as a school run by his wife, Clara Barnes Martin (1838-1886). Clara B. Martin was born in Maine to Phineas Barnes, a prominent publisher in Portland, who educated his daughter at the best schools. She in turn, became a writer and educator herself, writing a book about Mount Desert Island in Maine and publishing articles in national papers, along with operating a school in this building, designed and owned by her husband as they lived next door. After Clara died in 1886, the property was sold by the Martin heirs and in 1895, renovated into artist studios with two floors of large windows to provide natural light for the work inside. The building was owned and operated as artist studios by Ignatz M. Gaugengigl (1855-1932), a Bavarian-born artist who spent most of his professional life in Boston and was a prominent member of The Boston School, and Phoebe Jenks (1847 – 1907), a portrait painter who divided her career between New York and Boston. The building, while heavily altered, showcases the history of the Beacon Hill Flat neighborhood, which, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, became a popular place for artists and Bohemians, who renovated existing houses and stables in the Arts and Crafts, neo-Federal and other fashionable styles into loft spaces and studios. The 1895 renovation was undertaken by architect, Edgar Allen Poe Newcomb, who was the nephew of sculptor, Thomas Ball, likely providing him insight into the design of artist studios.
These three identical three-story houses at 156, 158 & 160 Mt. Vernon Street in Beacon Hill Flat were built in 1871 as income producing properties for Samuel and Emily Otis Eliot who lived next door on the corner of Brimmer Street. The architect is not evident from my research, but they were likely designed by Abel C. Martin, who furnished speculative housing for the Eliot’s elsewhere in the neighborhood. All three residences feature brick facades with off-center recessed entries on raised stoops. The use of brownstone lintels and sills, decorative brick cornice, and second-story hexagonal oriel windows add intrigue to the design, along with the slate mansard roofs. The three houses were sold or rented and all were owned by various families, but notable owners of the central house include the architect George Russell Shaw (1848-1937) of the firm Shaw and Hunnewell through the early 1900s. Later in the 20th century, the house was owned by Kevin White (1929-2012), who served as the mayor of Boston for four terms from 1968 to 1984. All three residences are well-preserved and look much as they did when constructed over 150 years ago.
The Charles Street Meeting House at the corner of Charles and Mount Vernon streets in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood is one of the finest examples of a Federal period meeting house in New England. The building is thought to have been designed by architect, Asher Benjamin, due to its similarities to his Old West Church on Cambridge Street built a year prior. At the time of construction in 1807, the church stood near the banks of the Charles River, but is now a distance away from the Charles following a land-filling campaign to expand buildable land in the city. The Charles Street Meeting House consists of a two-story gable-roof main structure with a three-story tower on the south (primary) elevation that supports a clock tower and wooden cupola with double Ionic pilasters supporting the domed roof. The building was constructed for the Third Baptist Church congregation, who used the nearby Charles River for baptisms. In the years before the American Civil War, it was a stronghold of the anti-slavery movement, and was the site of notable speeches from such anti-slavery activists as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Tubman and others. The Baptists sold the structure to the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1876, which was part of the first Black independent denomination in the United States. The AME Church sold the building in 1939 to the Charles Street Meeting House Society, and after a period of use as an Albanian Orthodox church, it was sold to the organization that is now, Historic New England, who were required to keep restrictions to preserve the building’s exterior. It served as a Universalist church from 1949 to 1979 with rented space inside to tenants, including a LGBT newsletter, Gay Community News, which was founded in the building in 1973. In 1980 the Meeting House was purchased by the Charles Street Meeting House Associates, who worked with the architectural firm of John Sharrat Associates to restore the building and adaptively reuse it into four floors of offices, with retail on the ground floor.
This iconic former firehouse at the corner of Mount Vernon and River streets in Beacon Hill, was built in 1949 and despite its relatively young age, has become an iconic landmark in the neighborhood. Since the mid-19th century, this site has been occupied by a fire station, most of which as a Second Empire, brick engine house with a mansard roof. After WWII, the Fire Department struggled to use the 1860s station which was built before the large, vehicular fire trucks replaced horses-drawn apparatus. In 1946, the Victorian station was razed and architect, John Mathew Gray, furnished plans for a new, Colonial Revival style station that could accommodate the larger fire trucks. The new station opened in April 1949 and Engine 10 remained here until 1982, when the company moved to 123 Oliver Street, Downtown. The Fire Department retained ownership of the building until 1995, and around this time, the building served as the filming location for television shows Spenser For Hire, which ran from 1985 to 1988 and the MTV seriesThe Real World, which was broadcast in 1997. Since 1998, the property has been home to Hill House, Inc. a long-standing non-profit providing sports activities for children, adult education classes and programs for senior citizens.
This unique house at 29 Brimmer Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill, was completed in 1881 is architecturally distinctive compared to the early 19th century homes that the neighborhood is known for. The five-story residence has a raised entrance up a flight of steps set within an arched opening. To the side, an arched window frames the facade and has an ornate terracotta panel as a base. More terracotta ornament can be found at the second floor and under the cornice as a thick band frieze with a copper-clad mansard roof above. The single-family residence was built in 1881 for Charles Faulkner (1811-1885), a commission merchant, for his daughter, Ann Ruth Faulkner the year of her marriage to Charles Rowley Hayden. Mr. Hayden was a musician and vocalist. For the new wedding gift, Faulkner hired the esteemed architectural firm of Bradlee & Winslow prepare the designs. The former Faulkner-Hayden House today contains five condominiums.
Buildings of New England 